Old dog, New Poli-Tricks

The dust has finally settled on the 2015 elections. The majority of those elected into public offices should be well out of the murky swamps of politics by now, fully immersing themselves in the daunting waters of governance. You are now backing into the all too familiar state of powerlessness until the next wave of campaigning and ‘stomach infrastructure’ returns in less than three years’ time.
While the politicians return to their fortresses of solitude, your senses return to you. Sighting a politician who has assumed office becomes a rarity but that was hardly the case a little less than a year and a half ago. It would have been okay if they were actually working behind those doors that suddenly slammed shut the moment they assumed offices you voted them into.
Now at this point you try to ease yourself into accepting the reality you evaded until a hideout was no more. You have once again been used and dumped by these politicians you so blindly love. Before you foolishly leap to their defence one more mind-numbing time, think a tad bit more selfishly.
Yes, you were in a state of inexplicable euphoria when your favoured politician was pronounced winner of a recently contested election. Now ask yourself this: are the pressing issues on which they were elected to tackle being treated? Are you even being kept in the loop of proceedings at all, or are you just languishing in a fool’s paradise singing praises of people who hardly lose any sleep over your case of chronic insomnia?
If you ever wondered the difference between a dependable politician and a political crook (yes, there is a difference), match their promises during a campaign with their performance when in office. A simple example for our APC and PDP fanatics to think about is the curious case of two senators, one a maiden APC senator representing a Kaduna constituent and his well renowned and experienced PDP counterpart from Enugu state.
While the Kaduna senator in light of his oath of office distributed 60 units of electricity transformers, 250 solar panels in a multi-million naira project to generate electricity for over 100 communities within his senatorial district, the much decorated PDP stalwart could only afford to promise a solitary transformer to the afflicted natives of a farming community after their community was invaded by armed herdsmen.
In any advanced or advancing country, not only would it be beyond baffling that a senator, with all his 13 years of experience in the upper chambers of his country’s parliament would still oversee communities without access to electric supply, it would be a gross travesty that by his perception, that was the best he could do to console the bereft and afflicted.
What makes the galled taste even bitterer is the saddening fact that this individual is a pioneering political figure in this crucial swing state which boasts of millions of voters, and great commercial prosperity. He would easily swat aside our Kaduna senator in a contested election nationally, much more in the south-eastern region due to his so-called political machinery.
In a country with politically naïve citizens such as ours, ‘political machinery’ is just a polished term used to describe the large number of stubborn sycophants wrapped around a politician’s finger, majority of which stand to gain little or absolutely nothing from their candidate’s leadership but have little or no problem with that.
As for those of you familiar with the campaign trails and rallies of your regional political elite and were the stronger voices amongst your peers for their re-election in cases where they sought for it, ask yourself this: how much better is your diet today than it was about half a decade ago before their previous tenure?
Ask the average native of Benue south why he would still vote for the former senate president despite the perennial investigative reports of his opulence and their glaring developmental stagnation, they will shamelessly refer to his experience as the major reason.The case of the current senate president and his herd of die-hard (or die easy rather) supporters hardly needs any reference in the spirit of innocent until proven guilty.
In Nigeria, an experienced government official is the worst kind there is. In a languishing community where the people cry endlessly into the ears of their leader, who is more likely to succumb to their demands? An aspiring leader, or a leader who has been in power for long enough to develop a seemed immunity to all the noise?
It is a thing of pride when your preferred candidate assumes leadership, but if you vote him in for the wrong reasons, there should be little other expectation than poor results on his assumption of office. An experienced politician is clever enough to expect criticisms for their ineptitude, so they cook up excuses for the gullible and unsure, play victim to their charismatic supporters, bribe the wise and influential, and voila!They’re back in business.
Nigerians suffer because of bad governance. The suffering is endless because these individuals have never left the political scene but merely recycle themselves within public offices and have grown so influential that they barely need to actually govern in order to gain the trust of their people. Thus they spend their days of office cooking up political schemes instead of governing.
After all politicking is easier than governance and the people are yet to understand that good politicians do not necessarily make good leaders and with so many naïve voters mentally shackled to ethnic sentimentalism, corruption and perhaps tormented by the ‘beggar’s mentality’, politicians will easily whip up another red herring and before you know it, we are powerless again and the demoralising cycle continues.